"Your body is the first thing any child of man ever wanted. Therefore dispose yourself to be loved, to be wanted, to be available. Be there for them with a vengeance. Be a gracious, bending woman. Incline your ear, your heart, your hands to them.... To be a Mother is to be the sacrament - the effective symbol - of place. Mothers do not make homes, they are our home." from Bed and Board, Robert Farrar Capon

Friday, January 11, 2013

Not a Mood, But Reality

The passage below is of much comfort to me because it is a confirmation that regardless of what feeling or lack of feeling for God or
repentance I can or cannot muster on any given day, no matter how "anguish of soul" takes shape in my inmost being, the Body and Blood of
Christ that I take during Communion every Sunday morning WORKS! It is an act of God taking place here and now. Period.

"What is it that gave to Luther's conception of Providence an immediacy,

the
freshness and vitality which had not been there since the days of the
prophets and Jesus?

Nought else but the experience of this which he calls
the forgiveness of sins.

We easily miss this connection, because in
the main,

forgiveness of sins is for us a much less fruitful word than
it was for Luther.

For us it tends to become either a doctrine which we
in faith "apprehend to ourselves,"

or else a purely subjective
"experience"; for Luther it meant something far beyond:

a real act of
God, the living God, through Christ, the living Christ.

As I lie there
in deepest anguish of soul, he himself comes, and this not as a

pictorial description of a shift in my subjective mood, but as an
altogether actual reality,

to accomplish that blessed exchange with
which Luther speaks about in his book on Christian liberty: He, all my
sin, I, all his fullness."

from "Our Calling", by Einar Billing, page 7

I am clean. I am forgiven. That is reality. What I "feel" at the time of receiving the Sacrament or at any other time is irrelevant. Thank God.